{"id":570,"date":"2015-09-25T17:29:25","date_gmt":"2015-09-25T17:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/?p=570"},"modified":"2022-06-11T20:14:47","modified_gmt":"2022-06-11T20:14:47","slug":"enacting-citizenship-and-enforcing-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/2015\/09\/25\/enacting-citizenship-and-enforcing-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Enacting Citizenship and Enforcing Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

As legendary civil rights activist Bob Moses<\/a> often reports, the sit-in demonstrators, freedom riders and voting rights activists of the 1950s and 60s enacted a freedom that they understood to be their birthright. Speaking in the voice of a Movement activist, Moses teaches that \u201cWe, as People of the United States claimed with our bodies the rights to occupy public space as civic equals and to be counted in the political process.”<\/p>\n

This performance of citizenship brought Movement activists into conflict with both state and private actors who refused to recognize the equality of African Americans. Such conflicts often resulted in legal\u00a0actions that pulled\u00a0the Supreme Court into the heated national debate over civil rights and raised key questions about the appropriate reach of federal power. In our article “Beyond the Confederate Narrative”<\/a> we analyze\u00a0two kinds of claims that the Movement called upon the Supreme Court to adjudicate two kinds of claims- \u00a0“enforcement” and “enactment”. (For visual summary of our analysis about how this civil rights debate played out post-Reconstruction, see part 1<\/a>, part 2<\/a>, and part 3<\/a> of this blog series).<\/p>\n

In \u201cenforcement\u201d cases, the Federal government attempted to prosecute individuals\u00a0for acts of domestic terrorism against civil rights advocates. The Court considered challenges to these federal prosecutions based on the ground that the national government had improperly usurped the States\u2019 police power to prosecute private violence. On the other hand\u00a0the\u00a0\u201cenactment\u201d cases concerned prosecutions against Movement activists who broke state laws or customs by\u00a0inhabiting public spaces on an integrated basis or attempting to diversify local political processes. In these cases, the Court heard challenges to prosecutions on the ground that activists could not be punished for exercising their national constitutional rights.<\/p>\n

Cases in both the enforcement and enactment category tested the boundaries of the national government\u2019s power to define and protect its People\u2019s rights. Each case was a contest of state and federal power, with states claiming supremacy in the realm of policing human behavior and the national government claiming supremacy as a guardian of human rights. We present two maps that illustrate the most important cases that in this line.<\/p>\n

\"Fig04_Enforcing_Enacting\"<\/a>

Enforcing and Enacting 1883-1964<\/p><\/div>\n

In the map above, the enforcement cases are Screws<\/em> (1945) and Williams<\/em> (1951). Although neither of these cases actually concerned violence against civil rights activists, they both involved federal prosecutions against state law enforcement officers for violations of civil rights. Local cops had acted brutally and violently and local\u00a0authorities had refused to prosecute their actions as crimes. In the Court, justices debated the limits of state versus federal power in a manner that perfectly captures the dialectic between Confederate and People’s narratives. The debate in Screws<\/em> and Williams<\/em> subsequently framed how the conversation turned when true Movement cases finally arrived at the Court.<\/p>\n

Three key enactment cases — Garner<\/em> (1961), Peterson<\/em> (1962), and Bell<\/em> (1963) — are also shown in this map. All three cases invalidated convictions of protestors trying to integrate state facilities. Although the result was pro-civil rights in each case, it was in the dissenting or concurring opinions of Justice Douglas in particular that announced the most progressive vision of\u00a0federal power’s right to confront state apartheid. (Readers\u00a0interested in the fascinating details of the cases can click on the map above to link directly to the underlying opinions via\u00a0Casetext<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"Fig05_Sharper_Cry\"<\/a>

Price and Guest in Context – 1871-1967<\/p><\/div>\n

This second map focuses attention on two critical and too-often overlooked enforcement cases — Price<\/em> and Guest<\/em>.\u00a0Decided on the same day in 1966, Price<\/em> concerned federal prosecutions of those accused\u00a0for the murders of James Cheney, Robert Goodman and Michael Schwerner while Guest<\/em> concerned prosecutions against the accused murderers of Lemuel Penn, an African American army reservist.\u00a0The map highlights\u00a0vital role that then-Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall played in introducing key Reconstruction legislative history into federalism\u00a0doctrine \u2014 Senator Robert Pool\u2019s statement regarding the 1871 KKK Act. Of course, it was the language from this Act that provided the basis\u00a0for federal prosecutions.<\/p>\n

This map thus demonstrates the importance of the non-Confederate understanding of Reconstruction to justify federal prosecutions of private actors for civil rights violations. Thurgood Marshall grasped this understanding from his pioneering civil rights work and his careful study of history. Though\u00a0our article, we seek to\u00a0recollect and reclaim the tradition Marshall embraced then. Our maps chart the\u00a0lineage and progression of this tradition in Court doctrine.\u00a0Next time, I will finish up this blog series by examining with one final map. This last map will turn from history to more contemporary Court doctrine in order to\u00a0advance the argument that the Confederate narrative still haunts our civil rights jurisprudence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As legendary civil rights activist Bob Moses often reports, the sit-in demonstrators, freedom riders and voting rights activists of the 1950s and 60s enacted a freedom that they understood to be their birthright. Speaking in the voice of a Movement … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":400,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/400"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":860,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions\/860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}